Austin's unique "BE"

Wednesday, September 23, 2009

What's Your Scene?

No one can deny that the burgeoning and ever-evolving online communities play a major role in shaping the world around us. Well, there’s no rule anywhere that says we can’t help shape those communities back, is there? That’s what the Austin Equation is all about for me: the creative communities expanding horizons, blurring the lines between and within different and sometimes isolated local scenes. We’re all part of Austin already, we just don’t necessarily talk. Well, let’s talk.

In order to thread the web of interactivity among the different Austin creatives, though, first we need to explore and identify the creatives and their scenes in Austin, which come from any number of industries and backgrounds. The Austin Equation is supporting my efforts with launching the Austin Interactive Initiative (also known as Aii) to create a cohesive and inclusive network of talented business members who are themselves committed to showcasing Austin as a city of wonderful and inexhaustible ingenuity. But how do we know who’s a part of it all, and how do we include you?

We used Mindmeister to track what we know about the Austin creative scenes. The map begins with the Austin Interactive Scene and branches out to include sectors we have so far identified, such as press and media, academia, the public sector, non-profits, and events, among others. The Scene Map is intended to bring together Austin professionals like you who make up the local creative class. Use the Map to visualize Austin’s interactive network, something we are all a part of and can both add to and benefit from, in order to facilitate connections and build the community.

We have begun the process of mapping out these scenes, businesses, and industries, but it is in no way complete. We want you to come and join the conversation. Add your industry to the Map and merge your creative talent and energy with ours to create a community with more richness, more knowledge, more talent—and more opportunities—than any of us can accomplish alone. Our strength is in collaboration, and our success will come from learning about and interacting with one another to generate a community that is more than the sum of its disparate parts.

Get involved!

Please linkin with me, and I will invite you to collaborate by placing your own stake on the map. We are also looking to convene a circle of interactive community leaders, so if you are interested in helping organize our next face to face meeting, please let me know. The focus of the meeting is vision building, making new connections, sharing ideas, and learning from each other.

On my company blog, The Squared Root, you can also find various articles related to various community members in Austin's Interactive Network who have helped us along our journey this year.

Join the emerging community that is both pushing the boundaries of what we know and can do and evolving into something new and uniquely Austin. We talk, we blog, we post, we comment, and we involve ourselves in every facet of creative Austin, forging connections and learning how to help each other.